Mail Call: Chasing Sweet Catastrophe

Heh, this may be the first time that I’ve offered a typewriter to a Correspondent and been flat refused. I grok it, friend Butane is quite resistant to technological change. At least his handwriting is pretty good and consistent. (: Ahh, it turned out some Youtube channel just pirated the “Linotype” movie, which I already […]

Joining the Corona 3 Club!

At first, I thought the serial was 16832, mainly because “1912” was written on one of the swing arms of the machine, but then I noted that the segment wasn’t the early-style ball bearing type, so re-checked and found it was a 1918 model (168320). A couple years ago, I ordered a part for a […]

Memories of Trump

So, I was just loading the new AntiX 23.2 on my old 2003 Toshiba Portege M200, and as usual I re-check the vitals of the machine to ensure the label is still correct, and what do I find under the RAM stick door??? Just goes to show that you can ignore reality, but you can […]

Mail Call: The Simulation Stabilizes a Bit

“Four Eyes” by Correspondent GJK. I was only saddled with glasses after 40, and then only for close-up work, so my experience with them is mostly irritation at not having them when I need them. I suppose it’s quite different when you need them at a much younger age. Just another annoying variable in that […]

Smith-Corona numbers normalized on TWDB

Well, since we’re pretty sure of which series started at 10k or 100k rather than 1 for the Smith-Corona portables past the Corona 4, it seemed silly to live with the “up to December” numbers that came from the sources, and which confused people anyway, so I have normalized most of them into Jan-Dec ranges […]

Field Mission: Updatin’ & Upgradin’

And tonight, the old computers in the house get Linux Mint XFCE on ’em, and “easyfied” setup with a browser with her account-wide saved settings and little else. the existing laptop is too old for Win 11, and I wouldn’t curse my worst enemy with that nonsense, so we make the old machine safe to […]